The Making of the Orderly City: New York Since the 1980S

JUHXXX10.1177/0096144217705459Journal of Urban HistoryChronopoulos 705459research-article2017 Article Journal of Urban History 1 –32 The Making of the Orderly City: © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: New York since the 1980s sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217705459DOI: 10.1177/0096144217705459 journals.sagepub.com/home/juh Themis Chronopoulos1 Abstract This article advances the concept of the orderly city, which has structural qualities and as a vision has dominated ideas about law and order in New York since the 1980s. The realization of the orderly city depended on the successful implementation of broken windows policing. This implementation required considerable reforms in the criminal justice system and the provision of substantial financial resources. Even then, without a considerable decline in serious crime rates, the city government would be unable to justify a war against minor infractions. The crime decline that occurred in the 1990s allowed the city government to equate the safe city with the orderly city. Moreover, as the economy of New York improved, the orderly city was promoted as a precondition of affluence. This article shows how these correlations are questionable and how the orderly city is based on morally and legally questionable actions such as racial profiling. Keywords orderly city, broken windows, quality-of-life, stop-and-frisk, police, New York In 2001, Steven Malanga of the conservative Manhattan Institute wrote an op-ed for the New York Post in which he linked New York City’s improved economic fortunes with the elimination of crime and disorder. Malanga’s claim represents a standard narrative shared by the mass media, the business sector, and many public policy makers around the world. According to this narrative, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001) and his first police commissioner William J. Bratton (1994-1996) followed the prescriptions of the broken windows theory and ordered the police to go after disorderly people because their behavior, if unchecked, represented a gateway to serious crime. In the process, both minor incivilities and major crimes declined and this seemingly made the city even more desirable for affluent people and corporations. This narrative has prevailed mostly because of adept political entrepreneurship by conservative commentators, politicians, think tanks, social scientists, and public officials. The orderly city is represented as an unques- tionable precondition for economic prosperity. The ordering of urban space has a long international history with multiple ideological con- notations that seek to justify the dominant political and social order. In the United States, the preoccupation with urban disorder intensified in the post-1945 period because of anxieties about racial transition and the future of cities. Urban disorder was divided into two components, physical and social. The terms “slum” and “urban blight” were utilized to define physical disorder, 1Swansea University, Wales, UK Corresponding Author: Themis Chronopoulos, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, UK. Email: [email protected] 2 Journal of Urban History 00(0) which in a general sense encompassed the decayed condition of the built environment of an area. Social disorder implied the congregation and activities of “undesirables.” These activities included anything from begging for money to playing music loudly to hanging out in street cor- ners. Various disorder eradication programs such as slum clearance, urban redevelopment, spatial fortification, aggressive policing, and the tight regulation of public and quasi-public spaces were used in U.S. cities during the postwar period.1 Despite a preoccupation with disorder that has defined urban governance for decades, the vision of the orderly city acquired a growing importance in New York during the late twentieth century. For Alex S. Vitale, this new emphasis on urban order required a paradigm shift: “While the previous paradigm of urban liberalism placed a premium on social tolerance, government planning, and reha- bilitation, the new paradigm was driven by a concern with social intolerance, market- and volunteer- driven mechanisms of social change, and punitiveness.”2 This new paradigm was articulated by Mayor Edward I. Koch (1978-1989) after the fiscal crisis and implied that the thousands of poor people, some of whom were homeless, proliferating in high-profile public spaces had to be con- tained. For Koch, the orderly city was synonymous with the successful middle-class city. The police became the agency in charge of making New York orderly by going after quality-of-life offenders. The vision of making New York an orderly city was continuously pronounced in the years that followed the fiscal crisis, but the mechanisms to achieve this vision were not present until the mid-1990s. This is because the reduction of social disorder in public spaces, as defined during this period, had four requirements: a well-funded police department, low crime rates, an effec- tively deployed and accountable police force, and an adequate criminal justice system. None of the four requirements were present in the 1980s and this undermined the vision of the orderly city. Still, this vision persisted and its continuous articulation justified the extreme measures that came into place to achieve it. The orderly city was realized under the stewardship of Mayor Giuliani in the 1990s and was maintained under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (2002-2013) in the early part of the twenty-first century. While crime rates also declined substantially during this period, as it is made clear in this article, the orderly city is not the same as the safe city. Crime rates also declined in many other major cities in the United States that did not pursue broken windows policing. In fact, the vision of the orderly city hardly existed in most other urban areas before the 2000s when it was promoted as an important precondition to revitalize city centers. Ultimately, the orderly city is based on the idea of racial profiling practiced by a police force seeking to dominate public spaces by regulating the activities of ordinary people of color. It is a difficult undertaking not only because it is morally and legally problematic but also because it requires resources and imperatives not available in most municipalities. The Broken Windows Theory and the Origins of Order-Maintenance Policing in New York City, 1978-1989 As already stated, the orderly city is not only a vision but requires a redefinition of policing. In the 1980s, major elements of the professional model of policing, which had dominated the opera- tional structure of most police departments in the United States since at least 1945, were dis- carded. This model was based on the standardization and professionalization of the profession, which was organized as a military organization and increasingly relied on the latest technological advances. In theory, the professional model had three important aspects: crime prevention, response to emergencies, and investigation of serious crimes (by detectives). In practice, the response to emergencies dwarfed the other two functions. Radio cars became very important tools of policing because they covered a large territory and facilitated rapid response and instan- taneous communication. This model of policing began to fall out of favor in the late 1960s as crime rates increased and communities felt a detachment from the police.3 Chronopoulos 3 In the late twentieth century, a strategy called order maintenance policing reemerged in reac- tion to the professional model. This strategy attempted to make the police sensitive to everyday problems at the neighborhood level by defining what constitutes legitimate behavior in public spaces and enforcing it. James Q. Wilson was the first to revive this idea of disorder eradication at least ten years before it became a priority among urban police departments. He defined disorder and disorderly people as follows: Disorder, in short, involves a dispute over what is “right” or “seemly” conduct or over who is to blame for conduct that is agreed to be wrong or unseemly. A noisy drunk, a rowdy teenager shouting or racing his car in the middle of the night, a loud radio in the apartment next door, a panhandler soliciting money from passerby, persons wearing eccentric clothes and unusual hair styles loitering in public places—all these are examples of behavior which “the public” (an onlooker, a neighbor, the community at large) may disapprove of and ask the patrolman to “put a stop to.”4 Wilson argued that powerholders originally entrusted the police with maintaining order, leaving crime fighting to private detectives, often ex-criminals who worked for people who suffered losses on a contingency-fee basis. In time, the police absorbed these detectives and their crime fighting objectives while professional prosecutors took over the responsibility of prosecuting criminals. Wilson continued that in the 1960s, the developments of urban rioting and a steep rise in crime further weakened the everyday order maintenance function of the police. Instead of focusing on how to make the streets safer, police departments in the wake of the riots concen- trated on preventing and reducing the incidence of mass violence.5 Moreover, because of the crime wave, police departments had to increase crime fighting activities and show results based on the number of arrests of criminals

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